The massive Gulf oil spill that nobody knew about

The most compelling argument for voters to add Amendment 9 to the Florida Constitution is a huge plume of oil defiling the waters off the Louisiana Coast, evidence of a recurring ecological disaster that has been percolating up from the seafloor for the last 14 years.

On Sept. 15, 2004, Hurricane Ivan blew through the Gulf of Mexico with waves that churned the seabed into a virtual mudslide. The shifting bottom and cyclonic winds buckled the skeletal steel legs supporting the Taylor Energy oil platform and the structure toppled into a tangle of pipelines jutting from the 25 wells down below.

It became the biggest environmental calamity you’ve never heard of.

The damage seemed irreparable. Nine of the holes belching oil and gas were deemed too dangerous to plug. Domes placed over the wells failed to stanch the leaks. Yet, for years, Taylor Energy has claimed the ruptures at the former site of Mississippi Canyon 20-A dribbled out only a few gallons a day. The Coast Guard, using company data, suggested the volume was a bit higher. But not enough to rile the public.

We were wildly, maybe purposefully misled. Last week, the Washington Post characterized the Mississippi Canyon 20-A leak as “on the verge of becoming one of the worst offshore disasters in U.S. history.”

It will only get worse. Experts say this leak could persist for another hundred years.

Who knew? This was like a damn state secret until a 2015 investigation by the Associated Press “revealed evidence that the spill is far worse than what Taylor -- or the government -- have publicly reported during their secretive, and costly, effort to halt the leak.”

AP, using independent experts, found that the amount of oil gushing up from the wrecked wells was at least 20 times greater than the company reported.

Last December, Skyforce, the environmental watchdog that first challenged company, claims that a relative trickle of oil accounted for a miles long slick, reported that the “estimated cumulative volume of crude oil spilled into the Gulf . . . now stands at between 855,421 and 3,991,963 gallons.”

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice released even more daunting findings. The feds were fending off Taylor Energy’s attempt to recover $432 million of the $666 million security bond the company had posted to cover clean-up costs. Oscar Garcia-Pineda, a Tallahassee-based geoscience consultant hired by the Justice Department, reported, “Abundant evidence” that the estimates contrived by Taylor Energy and the Coast Guard were “incorrect” and “unreliable.”

Garcia-Pineda calculated that 10,000 to

30,000 gallons of oil a day spews up from damaged wells, which suggests that about

153 million gallons has fouled the Gulf since Mississippi Canyon 20-A collapsed, which put the catastrophe on par with the BP oil spill in 2010.

Except they didn’t tell us. For years, Taylor Energy, abetted by the Coast Guard, downplayed the magnitude of the spill. It all might have stayed a near secret except Louisiana fishermen and other Gulf Coast residents kept insisting that they were seeing massive slicks out there. Or, if environmental activists hadn’t gone to court and forced the truth into the open.

So now we’re supposed to trust the Trump Administration and the Florida Petroleum Council and Explore Offshore, whose chairman, Jim Nicholson came to Tallahassee in August to promise that “the miracle of new science and technology has made the chances of a disastrous accident like that of the BP Deepwater Horizon in

2010 nearly impossible.”

Never mind that the oil industry’s miracle workers still can’t do a damn thing about the oil percolating out of Mississippi Canyon

20-A. Except to keep it quiet.

Of course, to give his minions Gov. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis a boost in the Nov. 6 election, Trump announced in January that he’d exempt Florida from his plans to open previously protected coastal waters to oil and gas drilling. Of course, our famously mercurial president could change his mind by Nov. 7. Especially if Florida elections don’t go to his liking.

The notion of allowing oil rigs near the Florida coast ought to terrify anyone who values the beaches, marine life and tourism. Remember, the hurricane that toppled Mississippi Canyon 20-A was only a Cat 3 storm. Fourteen years later, we’re entering an era of warmer Gulf waters and more threatening storms. But even without storms, oil wells off Louisiana and Texas leak more than

330,000 gallons a year into the gulf. Of course, that figure is based on companies’ self-reporting; like asking a very oily fox to inventory the hen house.

Floridians, as they decide whether to vote for Amendment 9, which would ban “exploration or extraction of oil and natural gas beneath all state-owned waters,” ought to remember that huge, perpetual slick fouling the Gulf -- the unending disaster the oil industry hoped nobody would notice.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter and columnist in South Florida since 1976.